I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.

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iterance 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

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neilv 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.

What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.

And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).

Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.

(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)

	▲	bluGill 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)

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mfro a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You assume the average consumer is paying any attention to the net weight of their purchases.

	▲	account42 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not at purchase time but eventually they notice that packs don't last as long as they used to. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the big corps) they won't change their buying behavior because of it though.

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yepitwas 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

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lbourdages 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.

Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.

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stephen_g 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.

	▲	dripton 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We do have unit prices, but sometimes they vary the unit from product to product within the same product category, making them useless for comparison. This one is by weight, this one is by volume, this one is by count. At that point you have to do all the math yourself, which most people won't. I don't know whether that's done intentionally. Hanlon's Razor says to assume not without proof.
	▲	apparent 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Some stores where I live have this, but others don't. And at some stores that do show it, the only reasonable prices are the items that are "on sale". And the sale prices don't have the price per unit, of course.
	▲	lbourdages 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We do, but not everyone looks at them. I certainly do not always look at it. A pet peeve of mine is tissues/toilet paper/paper towels. Sometimes the price is "per roll", sometimes it is "per sheets". Sometimes it's even different between different package sizes of the same product. It's infuriating to have to bust out the calculator to figure out if the deal on the 6 pack is a better price than the regular priced 12 pack.

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ajsnigrutin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.

At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.

Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.

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kjkjadksj 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.

	▲	illegalsmile a day ago \| parent [-]
		I've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.

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vachina 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.

	▲	account42 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler. Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.

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blamazon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.